Practical Applications
For the young contestants in this prestigious science fair, winning a patent is almost as important as earning top prize. Here’s a look at some top-scoring medical projects with real-world benefits.
Each year, 1,400 high-school students from more than 40 countries are invited to compete in the prestigious Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF), the world’s largest precollege science contest. The select group of young scientists is chosen from the several million students who compete in local and regional science fairs throughout the year. Participants compete for $3 million in scholarships and prizes, presenting projects in 15 categories like medicine, biochemistry, computer science and zoology. Earning top honors isn’t the only goal for contestants. Nineteen percent (or 274) of the finalists at the 2005 competition held last month have already begun the process to patent their projects.
Here’s a look at some of this year’s top projects:
Ameen Abdulrasool, a senior at the Illinois Junior Academy of Science, won top honors at this year’s Intel ISEF for his project, “Prototype for Autonomy: Pathway for the Blind.” He walked away with $70,000 in prize money and a free trip to October’s Nobel Prize ceremony. Abdulrasool developed technology that allows visually impaired individuals to navigate themselves from one location to another by using the Global Positioning System (much like General Motors’ OnStar system). Individuals wear a one-pound Walkman-size device, a bracelet on each arm and a pair of earphones. After entering a starting and ending location into a personal digital assistant (PDA), they are guided with verbal commands that tell them when and in what direction to turn. Simultaneously, a bracelet vibrates signaling the correct direction. To test his device, Abdulrasool recruited 36 blind adults and asked them to visit five landmarks in his neighborhood. The navigational tool saved people an average of 26 minutes in travel time and reduced the number of errors (wrong turns and missed locations). “Looking at how hard it was for them to travel and how they were dependent on everyone else motivated me to do something,” he says. Abdulrasool hopes is applying for a patent and then plans to market the product commercially.
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